Mrs. Black

Mrs. Black was the resident of Hale House, the settlement house in Boston's West End that had already drawn Mary Antin's younger siblings, Joseph and Dora, into its orbit. Dora had followed Joseph to Hale House and joined a club for little girls, and their enthusiasm was so infectious that Mary felt compelled to visit and see what the place was about. It was there that she found the Natural History Club, and it was Mrs. Black who stood at the threshold of that discovery, acting as the agent of what Mary would later call the second transformation of her life, as truly as her coming to America had been the first great transformation.

The Recruiter of an Unlikely Member

Mrs. Black's method of recruitment was patient and diagnostic. Mary herself did not know how Mrs. Black persuaded her to try the Natural History Club, given her pronounced aversion to bugs. The resident had evidently tried Mary in various girls' clubs and found that she did not fit, no better than she had fitted in the dancing-club she had attempted years before. Mrs. Black, Mary surmised, likely decided that she was an old maid and urged her to attend the meetings of the Natural History Club, which was composed of adults. The members were not people from the neighborhood but workers at Hale House and their friends, and they often had eminent naturalists, travellers, and other notables lecture before them. Mary's curiosity to see a real live naturalist probably induced her to accept Mrs. Black's invitation in the end, for up to that time she had never met anyone who enjoyed the creepy society of snakes and worms, except in books.

The Evening of the Spider Lecture

The Natural History Club sat in a ring around the reception room, facing the broad doorway of the adjoining room. Mrs. Black introduced Mary, who said "Glad to meet you" all around the circle and sat down in a kindergarten chair beside the piano. It was Friday evening, and Mary had the sense of leisure which pervades the school-girl's consciousness when there is to be no school on the morrow. She liked the pleasant room, pleasanter than any at home, and she liked the faces of the company she was in. She was prepared to have an agreeable evening, even if she was a little bored. The tall, lean gentleman with the frank blue eyes who got up to read the minutes of the last meeting was Mr. Winthrop, and he introduced the speaker of the evening, Mr. Emerson, whom all knew as an authority on spiders. Mary's nerves contracted into a tight knot at the word "spiders," and she gripped the arms of her little chair, determined not to run with all those strangers looking on. She recalled a hideous experience of long ago, when, putting on a dress that had hung on the wall for weeks, she felt a thing with a hundred legs crawling down her bare arm and shook a spider out of her sleeve. But the lecturer had no menagerie in his pockets; he talked in a familiar way about different kinds of spiders and their ways, and as he talked, he wove across the doorway a gigantic spider's web, unwinding a ball of twine in his hand and looping various lengths on invisible tacks he had ready in the door frame.

The Catalyst of Transformation

Mary was fascinated by the progress of the web and forgot her terrors, beginning to follow Mr. Emerson's discourse. She was surprised to hear how much there was to know about a dusty little spider, besides that he could spin his webs as fast as her broom could sweep them away. The drama of the spider's daily life became very real to her as the lecturer went on: his struggle for existence, his wars with his enemies, his wiles, his traps, his patient labors, the intricate safeguards of his simple existence, the fitness of his body for his surroundings, of his instincts for his vital needs. The whole picture of the spider's pursuit of life under the direction of definite laws filled her with a great wonder and left no room in her mind for repugnance or fear. It was the first time the natural history of a living creature had been presented to her under such circumstances that she could not avoid hearing and seeing, and she was surprised at her dulness in the past when she had rejected books on natural history. She did not become an enthusiastic amateur naturalist at once, but on the next sweeping-day she stood on a chair, craning her neck, to study the spider webs she discovered in the corners of the ceiling, and one or two webs of more than ordinary perfection she suffered to remain undisturbed for weeks, although it was her duty, as a house-cleaner, to sweep the ceiling clean. She began to watch for the mice that were wont to scurry across the floor when the house slept and she alone waked, even placing a crust for them on the threshold of her room and cultivating a breathless intimacy with them when the little gray beasts acknowledged her hospitality by nibbling her crust in full sight. And so by degrees she came to a better understanding of her animal neighbors on all sides, and she began to look forward to the meetings of the Natural History Club.

The Patron of a New World

Mrs. Black's role extended beyond that single evening. The Natural History Club she presided over as resident went on to organize excursions that became formative experiences for Mary. On one such occasion, the club spent the day at Nahant, studying marine life in the tide pools, scrambling up and down the cliffs with no thought for decorum, bent only on securing the starfish, limpets, sea-urchins, and other trophies of the chase. There had been a merry luncheon on the rocks, with talk and laughter between sandwiches, and strange jokes, intelligible only to the practising naturalist. The tide had rushed in at its proper time, stealing away their seaweed cushions, drowning their transparent pools, spouting in the crevices, booming and hissing, and tossing high the snowy foam. This excursion, and the club meetings that preceded it, marked the beginning of Mary's love of nature, a passion she confessed came late in her life. Looking back, she compared her bookworm days before the study of natural history outdoors to the barren existence of a lover before meeting the beloved, feeling remorse and shame akin to the lover's at the contemplation of that part of his life which he lived without his beloved. Mrs. Black, by discerning where Mary did not fit and steering her toward where she might, had given her access to a world that would expand her sense of the earth and the heavens, much as the sea had expanded her idea of the world during the long journey to America and the wide and unobstructed heavens had budded and swelled her idea of the world outside the earth. The resident of Hale House thus stood as a quiet but decisive figure in the chain of ready teachers and open doors that, in Mary's account, passed the immigrant child from hand to hand through the public schools, free libraries, and lecture halls toward the college gate.